


exception

by exhaustedwerewolf



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Angst, Being the Cleric is hard, Character Study, Families of Choice, Gen, One Shot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-14
Updated: 2018-06-14
Packaged: 2019-05-23 10:12:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,282
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14932280
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/exhaustedwerewolf/pseuds/exhaustedwerewolf
Summary: Pike reflects on the broken parts of the people she loves most in the world.





	exception

**Author's Note:**

  * For [awkwardacity](https://archiveofourown.org/users/awkwardacity/gifts).



> I can honestly say I probably would not have got up the guts to post it if not for your encouragement, so thank you so much for that, but more than that, thank you for being you- talking to you never fails to make me happy and it's a privilege to be your friend, and I don't say that enough ♥♥♥ (and good luck tomorrow! rip)

**_“And the conclusion that I’ve been coming to so far- and Pike being the exception to this rule, as she’s the exception to so many things- is I think we’re very broken people, but I think together, we are far greater than the sum of our parts. I like who we are together, and I think that’s important.”_ **

Everyday, Pike Trickfoot’s family break her heart.

In moments of peace, the gaps between easy conversation, melodious laughter, she catches glimpses of it, short and sharp as gasps. A doubt, a sudden, subtle dread; a pulling back of sorts- and she can’t bring herself to blame them for a self defence mechanism, would never. But still, she hurts for them. She can't articulate it, until one day she remembers the saying;

Each of them is waiting for the axe to fall.

It’s the look in their eyes, or the way they step back from the others almost imperceptibly, the wake-up call, prompted by nothing and everything at the same time. The look that says;

“How long until I lose this?”

“How long until I lose them?”

Scanlan laughs it off, laughs __everything__ off- from recurring nightmares to gruesome wounds, but some things you can’t just sing away. He’s loud, and Pike wonders privately if it’s because he was alone for so long, that he just got used to filling up the space with sound. If he doesn’t stop, well, he won’t know, will he, when it falls silent around him again, and what he doesn’t know can’t hurt him, right? Ignorance is bliss, so he chases both, and why shouldn’t he? Kick back and relax a little, now that he’s not fighting for food or coin or shelter every second of every day? Isn’t he entitled to a bit of childishness, a bit of fucking rest- he raised himself, she reminds herself, watching him with Kaylie- he had no-one. She will never begin to know what that’s like.

 _ _Know thy enemy__ is the phrase Vex’ahlia has embraced a little too well. Pike sometimes finds it hard to tell where the dragon ends and the woman begins. She speaks their tongue with fluency, ferity. She armors herself with their very skin, and nothing anyone says about her will pierce her dragonscale- or she won’t let them see that it does. She counts and recounts her hoard, the mountains of coins like the carcasses of great metallic dragons. When Pike has seen her turn her eyes on an adversary, the flame in them leaves no doubt. Vex sinks her claws into what is hers before it’s snatched away, because she has had so much taken from her- she would be a fool not to learn from it by now.

Where Vex plants roots, Vax’ildan keeps his feet off the ground. Entering a room, Pike learns from watching him that, without fail, his dark eyes seek out each door, each window- each potential exit. Hanging on too tightly will only make it harder to let go, so Vex is his exception, and everything else his fingers only graze. He throws himself into every fight, leans into every blow; Pike learns the twist in his scowl that means he’ll soon seek it out. She thinks it’s about getting complacent. He’s scared to forget what it feels like to hurt, because if he forgets, it’s going to hurt so much more when... He melts into the shadows, disappears off into the night, because if he forgets how to disappear, how will he be ready when...

Keyleth tries so hard to look out into the world wide-eyed, and how Pike loves her for it. But a shadow cuts across her face when she thinks no-one is watching her when they trudge through ruins or pass between shelves lined with history books. And suddenly those eyes are the most ancient, the most tired, that Pike has ever seen. Sweet, innocent Keyleth- the youngest of them in so many ways- whose eyes burn with righteous tears of anger whenever there is unjust hurt. Pike watches her, gentle with all the innocent, even the plants, coaxing them back to health, and the words _empathy fatigue_ cross her mind, and then she can’t stop thinking about them. The ghost Keyleth might become stands there so clearly that for a moment, Pike thinks her hand will pass through hers.

Pike hates it when Grog looks like that, feels a sharp, clawing pain in her chest at the sight of it, because more often than not, he gets it when he’s looking at her. When she gets hurt- __really__ hurt- he’s like a little boy seeing blood for the first time- dazed and too confused to be frightened, the way he looked when he staggered through the door, young-faced and stinking of gore, with Papa Wilhelm’s help, all those years ago. Uncomprehending of the gentleness of her touch. His hands tighten around the shaft of his weapon, and she can see him figuring it out again. That he’s all that stands between this band of brave, breakable people and the rest of the angry, fucked-up world. Him. The goliath left to choke to death on his own blood on the forest floor.

But what stings her like bitter cold- and it isn’t fair, she tells herself in the dark, fingers worrying at her holy symbol, that she should feel so keenly this bias- is Percival De Rolo. Polite, “respectful distance,” Percival De Rolo, who locks himself in his workshop, as if he hasn’t spent enough of his life locked up already. Who curls in on himself in his sleep, away from the warmth of the fire, shivering under his blue coat. On that rare occasion that he forgets himself, reaches out to one of them, his movement stutters, his fingers recoil. She’s seen him monstrous, yes, when the wrath has rent the fear, wreathed in smoke, ivory stained with ebony, but by Sarenrae, for every moment of ire there have been hundreds more of rue so strong that she can taste it on her tongue from metres away.

(For every moment of ire, she remembers the glassy-eyed look he turned upon her when she brought out rations by the fire. How he sat there in silence for a good minute before she thought to ask. The shake to his fingers as he took the proffered piece, unholy communion, and Sarenrae, it hadn’t been fair. She watched him and felt like it was a sin on her part, that she did not know what it felt like to have not eaten for days, understood, quite suddenly, the point of fasting. That it was Vax, watching out of the corner of his eye, who had to tell him to hold back so as to not to make himself sick.)

Because yes, Pike knows suffering, answered its siren call the dimly lit dawn she followed a group of strangers to Gatshadow to save her brother, learnt its tongue from the empty spaces in her life, where her parents were not, discerned the shape of it from its caresses in battle, in sleepless nights by the campfire, in the pulse of her own tired eyes fixed on the shapes in the shadows circling them, prowling just beyond reach of the light.

Despite this, and while she cannot quantify suffering, she cannot deny that these people- her family- have suffered more than she.

She lays her hands on a wound, and before the skin glows golden and furls, the clench-toothed sigh she hears, hissed out, is enough for her to know. The stutter in the breath that follows, the shudder of surprise, of cautious relief.

Pulling back- it breaks her heart.


End file.
